The Kilkenny Series Bundle by Louis L'Amour

Author:Louis L'Amour [L’Amour, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-8111-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

THE EARLY-MORNING sun was just turning the dew-drenched grass into settings for diamonds when Trent was out of his pallet and roping horses. Yet, early as it was, when he returned to the cabin the fire was lit and Sally was preparing breakfast. She smiled bravely, but he could see she had been crying.

Jack, only now beginning to understand what had happened, was showing his grief through his anger, but was very quiet, moving about the business of taking up the pallets and stowing them away. Trent was less worried about Jack than about Sally, for he knew her story.

According to what Dick Moffit told him, he had found Sally Crane hiding in the bushes some six years before, after he and those with him had come upon a few burned-out wagons. Her family had been murdered by a party of renegades posing as Indians, and she had been picking wildflowers when the attack came, suddenly and without warning.

Dick Moffit and his wife made a home for her, and when Dick’s wife had died a year before, Sally had quietly taken over the cooking and housekeeping, which she had only shared before. She had shown herself a cool, competent girl, but two such tragedies were shock enough for anyone to stand.

“You’re being a very brave girl, Sally. You’ll make some lucky man a good wife.”

“I hope to,” she said.

“Anybody can take the easy times,” he said. “It’s when the going gets rough that the quality shows. Now, when we’ve had breakfast, we’re riding over to the Hatfields’. You already know them, so there’s nothing I can say except that they are the salt of the earth.

“The Hatfields know who they are, they know what they believe in, and their kind will last. Other kinds of people will come and go. The glib and confident, the whiners and complainers, and the people without loyalty, they will disappear, but the Hatfields will still be here plowing the land, planting crops, doing the hard work of the world because it is here to be done. Consider yourself fortunate to know them.”

When breakfast was over he took them to the saddled horses. Then he walked back inside, and when he returned he carried an old Sharps rifle. He held it in his hands for a moment, looking at it, then he held it up to Jack.

“Jack,” Trent said, “when I was fourteen I was a man. Had to be. Well, it looks like your father dying has made you a man, too.

“I’m giving you this Sharps. She’s an old gun but she shoots straight. I’m not giving this gun to a boy, but to a man, and a man doesn’t ever use a gun unless he has to. He never wastes lead shooting carelessly. He shoots only when he has to and when he can see what it is he’s shootin’ at.

“This gun is a present with no strings attached except that any man who takes up a gun accepts responsibility for what he does with it.

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